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Daily Archives: May 14, 2011

SAN DIEGO, May 14, 2011 – Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) announced today that restoration of its game services will begin today. The phased restoration will include the return of nearly all of SOE’s portfolio of online games, the reinstatement of SOE’s game forums and websites, and added functionality to require players to reset their passwords.

What does it mean?

I guess, yay, things will be coming back.

But when is this going to happen?

Will anything be live this weekend?

Seriously, would a time line or a rough estimate kill them?

You are either ready to go, and you should be able to pass on some sort of conservative timeline, or you are not, in which case you continue to keep things to yourself.

The same vague sort of message hit the PlayStation blog as well. We’ll need to reset our passwords… whenever things come back up.

SOE has not put up a “not today” message since Thursday. I’m not sure if that is a bad thing or a good thing. They did say it would be a few more days at that point, so I guess they felt they were covered… at least for a few more days.

So it looks like the weekend is out.

I think the next stage will be to start announcing that the servers will be up “soon.” Long time SOE veterans know what that means. There is even an official definition in the knowledge base.

“Soon” Defined – Click for Full Size

Hopefully this will be the last weekend down.

On another comment thread I made a dire prediction that if SOE was down for three weekends or more, it would pretty much be the end of SOE as we know it. If it is only two… well, what do you think will happen?

This is going to be costly outage for them. They are not currently billing and won’t bill players for the down time. Thus every day down costs SOE a lot, in case you were wondering if they were motivated to move as fast as possible on this. Plus they have promised to give each subscriber an additional 30 days free for their trouble.

Can SOE get back to business as usual while losing almost 2 months of revenue this year?